Some Private Thoughts Real Estate Agents Have About Our Sellers

Now I should preface this by saying I'm not speaking for all REALTORS® with this post, but I can say with quite a bit of certainty I do speak for a lot, certainly our team. For the record we absolutely love working with sellers, we take great pride in pricing properly, keeping our sellers updated on market conditions, making sure the property looks as good as possible, etc. But just in the name of good fun, today we'll reveal some secret thoughts that many REALTORS® have during the selling process.

1) "You think your home is worth HOW MUCH?"

I think my favorite part of our listing presentation is the section on how NOT to price a home. We run down a list of about ten erroneous techniques to price a place, and often many of these are employed when sellers are explaining to us what net dollar amount they want in their pocket. We always listen carefully why people price their house the way they did, but many times there is a voice in our head saying "You cannot be serious!"

2) "I didn't know your home sustained an F6 Tornado recently". Sometimes there is a lot of clutter, and we always politely explain how to minimize it, but ever so often we encounter a hoarding house and it's hard to know where to even begin!

3) "You really love calling me, don't you?"

First of all, we are very attentive agents, we generally call our clients more than they call us! But every so often, we encounter a seller who just loves to call or email daily. Markets generally don't experience huge changes overnight, so there is very rarely anything to report on a daily basis. We tend to reject the term "high maintenance clients", as that implies being proactive as a seller is a negative thing. Having said that, be cool...that's all we ask. Be cool.

4) "Why would I lie about this?"

A big part of our job is feedback from showings. Lots of times we receive unfavorable feedback. It's not fun but just a part of this job. We had one seller, and her place had a bus stop in front of it. Obviously this produced a lot of negative feedback, and one day when we called her to express concern about the current price, she said "well, I don't agree with that feedback".

...

It's not up to the seller to agree or disagree. Maybe she loved having city buses come every half hour and park in front of her home, perhaps it brought her great joy. But most buyers won't feel the same way, so sometimes we have to just laugh at how sellers interpret feedback so personally.

5) "Do you want your house to sell, or...?"

This isn't common but sometimes it literally feels like sellers are sabotaging their own house sale. We had one seller who always turned down showings, close to half. It was a tough sell to begin with, and sending away 40% of prospective buyers was a pretty tough pill for us to swallow. Other times it's leaving 'questionable' posters on the wall, mousetraps out...common sense isn't as common as one might think!

99% of our sellers don't trigger these thoughts in our brain, but those 1% tend to stick with us. Hopefully you all got a good laugh here, have a great weekend!